Welcome to my home lab knowledge base. This knowledge base is a living collection of documentation, practical experience, and lessons learned gathered from the technologies, services, and projects that I have deployed, tested, maintained, and learned from within my personal home lab environment.
My home lab is built around the principles of learning, curiosity, and continuous improvement. Technology is constantly evolving, and this environment exists as a safe and controlled sandbox where I can explore new concepts, test open-source solutions, understand different approaches, and develop practical skills without impacting production environments.
The environment allows me to evaluate technologies, self-host services that provide genuine value, experiment with different architectures, and apply best practices wherever possible. Through this process, I aim to not only understand how technologies work but also understand why certain decisions, configurations, and approaches are made.
This knowledge base documents both current and future projects within my home lab. It includes deployed services, infrastructure changes, experiments, proof-of-concepts, lessons learned, troubleshooting experiences, and areas where I have identified opportunities for improvement. As my environment evolves, this knowledge base will continue to grow alongside it.
This knowledge base has been structured using a Knowledge-Centred Service (KCS) approach. KCS is a methodology I am familiar with and have found to be an effective way of capturing, maintaining, and retrieving knowledge.
The purpose of using KCS is to ensure that information is captured in a consistent, searchable, and reusable format. Instead of documenting knowledge only when problems occur, this approach encourages documenting experiences, solutions, decisions, and improvements throughout the life cycle of a technology or service.
Each article aims to capture practical knowledge from my own experiences, including:
The goal is to create a knowledge base that reflects real-world experience rather than simply reproducing vendor documentation.
This knowledge base represents my personal experiences and approach to technology. It should not be considered an official guide, supported documentation, or a guaranteed solution for every environment.
Every home lab is different, and the decisions documented here are based on my own requirements, available resources, testing results, and understanding at the time of implementation. Technologies, configurations, and recommendations may change as I continue to learn and as my environment evolves.
Where possible, I aim to follow secure and responsible practices, but readers should always validate configurations, understand the implications of changes, and adapt solutions to their own environments before implementing them.
The intention of this documentation is to share knowledge, provide insight into my technical journey, and allow others to understand my approach. If something documented here helps someone deploy a service, troubleshoot an issue, or explore a new technology, then the knowledge captured has achieved its purpose.
All documentation is written and maintained in Markdown format, with Obsidian being used as the primary workspace for drafting, organizing, and maintaining knowledge before publication. This allows the knowledge base to remain flexible, searchable, and easy to update as my environment changes.
Alongside technical documentation, this knowledge base will also contain:
This approach ensures that the history and reasoning behind decisions are preserved, not just the final outcome.